Google+ communities
This has been my first experience with Google+ Communities, and I think I'll continue to use them as I go forward. The website is pretty easy to navigate (it's a Google product and Google usually has pretty good user interfaces) and it hasn't got the younger crowd that Twitter and Pinterest have, so the content is much more consistently professional. On Twitter and Pinterest, there's great content but you have to rifle through the social media aspect before you can find anything useful. Google+ Communities seem to be mostly professional people sharing ideas. There are certainly ways that I could use this in my life, and I think I could find ways to use it in my classroom as well.
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I got really into the iPad Ed community on Google+. I'm still very new to the iPad and I'm trying to discover how to integrate the iPad into my classroom in creative ways. This page has ENDLESS ideas! A lot of the resources on this page are for beginners specifically, so they were easily accessible for me. There was a post called, "iPad Coding Apps for Beginners" that actually made me feel tech savvy for a moment. There's also a few posts called, "The Periodic Table of iPad Apps" and those posts are FULL of wonderful apps that are flexible enough to allow for creativity by the teacher. I know that technology will be changing faster than I can keep up with it, but now I know that Google+ has resources from people much more tech savvy than me.
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I adore the Teachers Helping Teachers community on Google+. This community of professionals is like Pinterest, but everything's free. I only had to scroll down for 5 seconds before I found a wonderful video on "Grammar Made Easy" that I may not use in my classroom, but I'll use that style in my classroom. I also found a "4 Fun Literacy Activities using Google Docs" page that really beefs up my knowledge of the Google Platforms and how to integrate them into my classroom. I'm so glad I found this community!
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Overall, I think Google+ Communities can be of great use to me especially at the beginning of my teaching career, but really my entire career and beyond. One way that it can be used in my classroom is by gathering up a bunch of other English teacher friends and connecting our classes. If two teacher friends and I are all teaching Madame Bovary at the same time, we can create a Madame Bovary board and let our students collaborate on the novel together. This way, the students are not only discussing the book with other students in their class, but students from all around the country. Different perspectives only make literary criticism more interesting and more effective for the students. I can't wait to use Google+ in my classroom and personal life!